THE
INTER-TRIBAL INDIAN CEREMONIAL
AT GALLUP
In the middle nineteen thirties
Mrs. Susan C. Peters
brought to the Inter-Tribal Ceremonial at Gallup
a group
of young artists and dancers from the Kiowas of
Anadarko,
Oklahoma. Monroe Tsa Toke brought and
exhibited two of his paintings,
"The Cormorant,"
and "The Yellowhammers."
During the Ceremonial in the evenings there are pre-
sented parts of
ancient ceremonies intermingled with
the dances still surviving, each
presented by some one
of the twenty-one tribes. Here one begins to realize
something of the emotional stir in such Indians as
Tsa Toke, a ceremonial
drummer, in their participation.
In the Southwest at night the stars
seem closer to the
earth, more a part of the very old world in time
and
culture which the Indians bring before us. There are
suggestions
of ancient ritual dance, the earliest form of
drama, almost as old as
the human race. This survival in
the dance and music, still alive and
potent in the Ameri-
can Indian's cosmos, is "theatre" in the
truest sense of
the word and beautiful theatre. Here is the continuance
of parts of the fertility rites from the remote past, of the
xi